Application response monitoring systems measure and report on the performance of computer applications, especially as regards procedures or transactions initiated by user input. Such systems measure the delay between a user issuing an instruction to an application to perform a given action, and the application being ready to receive a next instruction from the user. Some systems also measure stages within the transaction and can report how much of the delay is due to each stage. Application response monitoring systems are used professionally by both developers of applications and by administrators of computing environments in which applications are used.
“Point-and-click” describes a style of graphical user interface (GUI) for computers. Microsoft's Windows, Apple's MacOS, many UNIX variants, and other operating systems feature point-and-click GUIs. In one common configuration, a computer includes a display screen, a mouse, and a keyboard. The operating system (OS) renders a pointer on the display screen and moves the pointer in response to movements of the mouse by a human user. The pointer acts a virtual tool within the GUI to indicate areas to interact with. The mouse includes a button that is clicked by the user. The user's keystrokes from the keyboard are still another form of user interaction.
Typically, some software applications running on the computer have visible windows in the GUI. At any given time, one of the windows has “focus”, i.e., is the default recipient of keystrokes. The user can interact with controls in a window, such as buttons, icons, menus, and so forth, or can change the focus to a different window. A similar notion of focus exists among controls within a window, i.e., the “active” control is the default destination for keystrokes when multiple controls are present.